Congolese warlord accused of massacre placed in ICC custody

A Congolese warlord accused of organising an ethnic massacre of 200 civilians in 2003 and sexually enslaving some of the survivors has been transferred to the international criminal court .

Germain Katanga, 29, the alleged leader of the Patriotic Forces of Resistance in Ituri in north-east Democratic Republic of the Congo, was flown from Kinshasa to The Hague on Tuesday. He is the second suspect in the ICC's custody, joining a fellow Congolese, Thomas Lubanga, who was involved in the war for control of the mineral-rich Ituri province in 2002-03. About 8,000 civilians were killed and half a million people displaced in the war.

Mr Katanga is charged with six counts of war crimes and three of crimes against humanity. They relate to an attack on the village of Bogoro in Ituri on February 24 2003. He is alleged to have planned the massacre with leaders of the Nationalist and Integrationist Front, who shared a similar Lendu ethnicity. Most of the 200 dead were from the Hema ethnic group.

"His [Mr Katanga's] name will forever be associated with the name of Bogoro: an ordinary village, which he ordered fighters under his command to 'wipe out'. Hundreds were slaughtered. Women were forced into sexual slavery," Fatou Bensouda, the deputy prosecutor of the case at the ICC, said in a statement yesterday.

Mr Katanga is accused of using child soldiers in the attack and imprisoning villagers in a room full of corpses. Reports have also linked him to the mass killing of 1,200 mainly Hema civilians near the Nyakunde hospital in Ituri during 10 days in September 2002. In 2004, he was one of six Ituri warlords appointed as generals in the national army to bring peace to the region. After the massacre of nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers in Ituri two months later, blamed on the Lendu militias, he was arrested at the Grand Hotel Kinshasa. The warrant for his arrest by the ICC was made on July 2 this year, but only became public yesterday.

More indictments for crimes against humanity in the Congo are expected.

Human Rights Watch welcomed his arrest and called on the ICC to extend its investigation to include senior military and political figures who backed the warlords. The New York-based organisation said Uganda, whose army was involved in the Ituri conflict, provided military and financial backing to Mr Katanga and the Nationalist and Integrationist Front and should be called to account.